Quick Apology: Potential Life?

In January there was the annual “March For Life” in Washington DC. Unfortunately, I couldn’t go this year, but thanks to Facebook, I got to defend life in a different way, through Facebook. Many of my pro-life friends posted about the March on Facebook, and these posts were not without their detractors…

The Objection

As I browsed my newsfeed, one objection which was made repeatedly was some variation of the following:

“The fetus is a potential life”

Is this true? How might we respond to this statement?

The response

The Meaning of words

Statements like “The fetus is a potential life” really make very little sense when one considers the meaning of the words used. The word “fetus” simply denotes the stage of development of, in this case, a human being. But what does it mean to be “a potential life”? When I hear people use a phrase like this, I press them for an explanation as to what that phrase actually means.

The phrase “potential life” can’t refer to biological life since, under normal circumstances, an unborn child in her mother’s womb will be alive. In fact, it is the very fact that the fetus is alive which the abortionist seeks to change.

Potential X, Actual Y

To describe the unborn as “potential life”, of course, begs a very important question. If a fetus is “a potential life” (whatever that means), what is it now“? After all, you can only be a potential X, if you’re an actual Y.

When I posed this question in recent exchanges, I did not receive an answer…

Being Potential vs Having Potential

Earlier this year I was speaking to a pro-choice advocate who gave a slight variation on this objection. Rather than saying that a fetus “is potential life”, he told me that it “has potential life”.

In response to this, I pointed out that, at that very moment, he too had “potential life”. He had the possibility of continued existence and this sustained life was dependent upon his being given (a) time, (b) adequate nutrition and (c) an safe environment in which to live. I said that, given these conditions, he would most likely grow from adulthood into old age.

I then pointed out that the exact same thing is true for a fetus. If the fetus is given (a) time, (b) nutrition via the umbilical cord and (c) a safe environment in the womb, that it too would transition from one stage of human development (“fetus”) to another (“infant”).